After 3 weeks, I've really gotten into my project. To put it in "layman's layman's terms" (as Dr. Peretz would say), I'm going to be working on optimizing the conditions of the nanocrystal syntheses. Today I ran a series of reactions to see what the best Cadmium to Selenium ratio would be. After 5 reactions and running UV-Vis and fluorescence spectrums on five samples from each of those reactions, the day was already over.
Over the past week, I've been experimenting with recovered dots (nanocrystals that were recollected from the spinner after we spun the films.) While the actual recovery of the dots isn't so difficult, it became a problem after the second recovery. This was because the dots became soluble in everything, so they couldn't be cleaned. Luckily the first recovery still works well, and allows us to change the concentration of the dots if we want.
Looking ahead, I still have to analyze the data from today. Tomorrow I'm going to be testing some of the films we previously spun. After that I'll be doing some more reactions to find how concentrated we can make the dots. The more concentrated, the better the yield will be (right now we get 1g of dots per 1L reaction, but we could bring that anywhere up to 50g of dots). I only have two weeks left, but I know the hard work is just beginning
-Alec
Over the past week, I've been experimenting with recovered dots (nanocrystals that were recollected from the spinner after we spun the films.) While the actual recovery of the dots isn't so difficult, it became a problem after the second recovery. This was because the dots became soluble in everything, so they couldn't be cleaned. Luckily the first recovery still works well, and allows us to change the concentration of the dots if we want.
Looking ahead, I still have to analyze the data from today. Tomorrow I'm going to be testing some of the films we previously spun. After that I'll be doing some more reactions to find how concentrated we can make the dots. The more concentrated, the better the yield will be (right now we get 1g of dots per 1L reaction, but we could bring that anywhere up to 50g of dots). I only have two weeks left, but I know the hard work is just beginning
-Alec
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